When you perform a gradual upgrade, you can determine which sites to upgrade and when. Before you can upgrade any sites to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you must run Setup and the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard on all servers in your server farm. After you have completed that step and installed any language template packs you need, you can begin to upgrade sites. For more information about upgrading your servers, see Install and configure Windows SharePoint Services for a gradual upgrade.

When you are ready to upgrade your sites, you can use either the upgrade pages in the SharePoint® Central Administration Web site or the upgrade operation on the command line. Use the command line if you want to run upgrade for large batches of sites at different times, or if you have installed a language template pack after upgrading other sites in your environment.

There are two phases in the process for upgrading sites from the Central Administration pages. First, you create a new Web application to host the upgraded versions of the sites. Then, you upgrade one or more site collections.

Important:

You must upgrade the root site collection before you can upgrade any other site collections in the Web application.

Create a new Web application to host upgraded sites

In Central Administration, on the Operations tab, under Upgrade and Migration, click Site content upgrade status.

On the Site Content Upgrade Status page, next to the URL you want to upgrade, click Begin upgrade.

On the Set Target Web Application page, in the Web Application to Upgrade section, verify that the Web application you want to upgrade appears.

In the New URL for Original Content section, in the Port box, type a port number, and then in the Host Header box, type the host header to use (if needed).

In the Application Pool for New Web Application section, select Create new application pool, then in the Application pool name box, type a name, and then select either Predefined or Configurable.

If you selected Predefined, select the account to use.

If you selected Configurable, type the account name to use, and then type the password for that account.

Note:

You cannot use the same application pool that you used for the previous version. You can use the same user account, but you must create a new application pool, or use an application pool that you already created for your upgraded sites.

If you choose Restart IIS Manually, you will need to restart IIS after the Web application is created in the final step in this procedure.

In the Security Configuration section, under Authentication Provider, select either Negotiate (Kerberos) or NTLM depending on your environment.

In the Content Databases section, select either Automatic database name selection or Manually set database names.

If you choose to manually set the database names, then on the Database Names page, you must supply names for the temporary content databases and the new version content databases.

Click OK. If you chose to manually set the database names, the Database Names page opens. Type the names to use for the temporary content databases and the new version content databases for this Web application, and then click Save.

An Operation in Progress page appears while the new Web application is created.

Note:

If you chose to restart IIS manually, you must now run iisreset /noforce on each front-end Web server in your server farm.

Upgrade site collections

On the Site Collection Upgrade page, select the check boxes next to the sites you want to upgrade, and then click Upgrade Sites.

Important:

You must upgrade the root site collection before you can upgrade any other site collections in the Web application. If you are upgrading multiple site collections at one time, the root site collection must be included in the first set of sites that you upgrade.

On the Sites Selected for Upgrade page, verify the number of site collections, the storage used, the originating database, and the target database, and then click Upgrade Sites.

The Upgrade Running page opens, and upgrade runs for the selected site collections. This may take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on how many site collections you have selected and how large the site collections are. The Status page refreshes automatically every minute to provide you with an updated status. If the upgrade fails or reports issues, you can refer to the log files for more information. The Upgrade.log file and the trace log file are located at %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS. The trace log is named in the following format: Machine_name-YYYYMMDD-HHMM.log, where YYMMDD is the date and HHMM is the time (for example, Server1-20061105-1241.log).

After the upgrade process has completed, click Home to return to the Central Administration home page.

To upgrade sites by using the command line, you must follow the same two-step process: create a target Web application, and then upgrade the sites.

To create the target Web applications, use the following command, including any options that apply to your environment (skip this step if you have already performed the steps under "Create a new Web application to host upgraded sites" above):

Then, after you have created the Web application, you can upgrade individual site collections by using the following command, including any options that apply to your environment:

stsadm -o upgrade [-inplace | -sidebyside] [-url <url>]

[-forceupgrade] [-quiet] [-farmuser <farm user>

-farmpassword <farm password>] [-sitelistpath <sites xml file>]

For example, to upgrade sites at a particular URL in a side-by-side (gradual) upgrade process, you would use the following command:

stsadm -o upgrade -sidebyside -url <url>

-sitelistpath <path to XML file>

Note:

When you use the command line to perform a gradual upgrade, you cannot upgrade sites from different content databases. If your Web application contains a large number of sites spread across multiple content databases, break the list into smaller groups of sites contained within the same content database.

If you performed an in-place upgrade and then installed a language template pack, you must now upgrade any sites that depend on the language in that language template pack. To perform the upgrade, perform the upgrade operation on the command line by using any options that apply to your environment.